Strategies for Teaching with Online Tools
Bedford Workshops on Teaching Writing Online
Nick Carbone, New Media Consultant
Bedford/St. Martin's
ncarbone@bedfordstmartins.com		  Workshop Home

Nutshelling: Shrinking and then Growing Anew

Activity
You can do this one on your own as well, but it's a good exercise to do with a peer reviewer. Ask your reader to reduce each paragraph in your essay to its essential idea. Here's an example:
A wonderful way to spend time with kids is to simply sit and talk to them. You don't have to go to the park, or ride bikes, or play a game, or watch t.v., or be eating, or anything else at all. Just sit and have a conversation. Kids will surprise you equally by the irony they can bring to their voice when they refer to an adult you both know or by the earnestness that comes forth when they explain something they've learned. They make surprising connections, ones adults may have already shut out. They're good listeners and good thinkers too. Kids think a lot, often privately and quietly, and talking with them reveals the depths of their concerns and wonderments. They're often good conversationalists and good company.
In a nutshell, the passage says:
Talking to kids will surprise you and offers you good conversation and good company because kids are smarter than you think.
You can see where the nutshell lacks the detail of the original, but it provides an accurate enough summary. If you nutshell a writer's work, you can go paragraph by paragraph. You can also nutshell groups of sentences instead of a whole graph. One variation on this activity is for you to nutshell your own piece first, and then compare your nutshells to your peer reviewer's.

The Benefits
Nutshelling lets a writer see what a reader sees as the main point. In the nutshell above, the writer might be surprised that the nutshell didn't include the idea about how open kids' minds can be, and that could be something for her to think about. But what's more useful even than that is how you might work from a nutshell when you revise.

Using this Activity to Revise
One way to revise is to set aside the draft the peer reviewer based the nutshell on, and then use the nutshells as seeds to grow new drafts. So the writer of the above passage might take the nutshell, Talking to kids will surprise you and offers you good conversation and good company because kids are smarter than you think., and write out from that alone:
I like to talk to kids because they really love to talk. I like it better than playing with them, though that's a blast too. When I talk to a kid, I'm impressed by how much they pay attention, not only to what I have to say, but to what they're saying; I can sense them listening to and enjoying their own words and the effect the words have on me as I nod, or smile, ask them a question, or offer a reply. It's like a game of catch with words, smart words. Kids have a lot of time to think about things, to imagine things, time many of us adults don't have. Conversing with kids is a great way to get a fresh perspective.
What nutshelling can do is break you out of your text by boiling it down, melting it into an essential nugget from which you can fashion something new, like a goldsmith might do with a melted ring. As you can see from this example, using nutshells as a basis for revision can often lead, if you let it, to dramatically different expressions of the same idea. Then you can compare versions, choose one over the other, or merge things together.